AltVMs, Rollups and the Cartesi Machine

The modular narrative has brought an increased spotlight on the importance of powering up our execution environments. With the cool data layers popping up and getting ready for production, the bottleneck for dapp development quickly shifts from data availability to the power and expressiveness of these "VMs".

The EVM excels in many aspects, but adopting modular architectures (and rollups) without exploring the execution environment design space would be a huge waste! This is why the Cartesi Machine stands out when the subject is execution environments: It lets you reuse the last 50 years of software development in a reproducible way. This means the ability to use existing standards, programming languages, tools, file systems and all. With the Cartesi Machine, you get to boot a full Linux operating system in a completely self-contained, reproducible, and transparent manner. In more technical terms: the Cartesi Machine emulates a complete RISC-V processor in a way that the results of these computations are disputable on-chain (by a single honest party with limited resources). The emulator can be stopped after any given cycle and completely characterize the state of the machine at that point. This includes the value of all registers, the contents of RAM, storage devices, and everything else you can think of. All the state is encoded in a way that is accessible by an entirely separate implementation of the machine. There is a blockchain version of it, which is able to transition the state of the machine in exactly the same way as the off-chain emulator does when executing a cycle, even without the ability to hold its full state (which wouldn’t fit the blockchain). Making this run in a simple and performant way, was quite a challenge.

The Cartesi Machine is complete, well-tested, and available. But it also keeps improving. There is so much that could be talked about: stateless execution, the microarchitecture, hypervisors, dehashing devices, running it in a browser.

In-depth interview about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUzn_vdWyDM